The House on Ambervein Lane

The house had been sitting empty for two years before Luce moved into it.

Her aunt Vera had owned it, and Vera had been dead almost that long, and the paperwork had taken most of the time in between. Luce had signed the transfer papers in March and had not opened the front door until June. That was the kind of year she was having.

She was thirty years old. Her husband Gene had been dead over two years. People kept telling her that grief came in waves, and it did, but nobody told her that some waves were small and some of them took the whole beach out from under her feet. She had stopped going to the group meetings at the library. She had stopped answering most of her mail. What she had not stopped doing was working, because the archive basement where she spent her days was quiet and cold and did not ask her how she was holding up.

Her colleague Freddy had asked, though. Freddy asked every Friday.

"You look like someone who slept in her coat again," Freddy said that last Friday, dropping a coffee on Luce's desk.

"I did sleep in my coat. It was cold."

"It's June, Luce."

"Then it's a warm coat."

Freddy sat on the edge of the desk and looked at her the way she did, which was too long and too directly. "Take the summer off. You've got the leave banked. Go out to that house. Fix it up. Get some sun."

"There's no sun out there. It's four hours north and it rains sideways."

"Then get some rain. Rain on a roof you own is better than rain on a roof you don't." Freddy said these things like proverbs, and half the time they were just her grandmother's sayings, but this one landed.

So Luce took the summer. She packed two suitcases and a box of books and drove her old gray hatchback north on a Thursday, past the last strip mall, past the last cell tower for a while, until the road narrowed and the trees closed over it and the asphalt turned to gravel.

The house sat at the end of Ambervein Lane, which was not really a lane so much as a driveway that thought of itself as more. It was a two-story place, wooden, paint gone gray and peeling, with a wraparound porch that sagged at one corner. Vera had lived out here alone for thirty years, and Luce had visited exactly four times in her life, all before she was out of her twenties, all of them strange and quiet.

The landlord, if that was the word, was a man named Nico who lived six miles down the road and handled the taxes and the well pump and whatever else needed handling. He was in his sixties, built the way a fence post is built, and he had met her at the gate with a ring of keys.

"Water heater's temperamental," he said, handing the keys over one at a time. "Furnace works if you talk nice to it. Well's good. Any trouble, my number's on the fridge."

"Thanks, Nico."

He looked up at the house for a while. He did that, she noticed. He looked at it like it was an old dog that had once bitten somebody.

"Listen," he said. "There's a room off the upstairs back hall. Door sticks. Painted shut, more or less. Vera kept it shut."

"Kept it shut how?"

"Just kept it shut. Some people keep rooms shut. Don't read too much into it." He got back in his truck, then rolled the window down. "If you do open it, tell me what you find. I've always wondered."

Then he was gone, and the dust he raised hung in the air over the lane for a full minute.

* * *

The first week she did nothing but clean. Swept out mouse leavings, aired the mattresses, scrubbed the kitchen until the counters showed their actual color, which was a yellow the seventies would have been proud of. The house creaked at night. She had expected that. Old houses creak. She told herself the sound was only the wood cooling down, and most nights she believed it.

There were two rooms upstairs she never went into. One was Vera's, still half furnished, a comb on the dresser with gray hairs in it. Luce could not face that yet. The other was the one Nico had mentioned, at the end of the back hall, and its door was not just stuck. It was latched from the outside with an old iron hook-and-eye, the kind of thing you'd use on a shed.

She stood in front of it on the ninth night, holding a lamp, and thought about Vera keeping it shut.

"Just kept it shut," she said out loud, to nobody.

Then she lifted the hook, because she was her mother's daughter and her mother had never once left a door closed.

The door opened with a sound that resembled a long exhale.

Inside, the room was one shape and one color. Every wall, floor to ceiling, was painted. Not wallpaper. Painted, by hand, and old, the pigment gone soft and chalky in places. It was a forest at dusk, and the trees ran around all four corners of the room without a single seam she could find, trunks climbing up over the ceiling and down across the floor, roots threading along the baseboards. Between the trees there was a path, and the path led, on the north wall, to a clearing.

In the clearing stood a figure.

It was painted tall, taller than a person, and it had no face that she could fix on. She moved her lamp closer and the features seemed to slide, the way a face does in a dream. Long hair, dark. A robe the color of river water. One arm was raised, palm out, and around the palm the artist had painted a faint ring of gold, and the gold was worn in a way the rest of the paint was not, as if someone had touched it, over and over, for years.

The air in the room was warm. That was the first thing that actually frightened her. The rest of the house held a damp northern chill even in June, and this room felt like a body had been standing in it. She put her hand flat against the wall and the plaster was faintly, impossibly warm, and there was a rhythm under her palm that she told herself was the furnace, the pipes, the wind, anything.

She took her hand off the wall and went downstairs and made tea she did not drink.

* * *

The journal was in the hall closet, in a hatbox, under three winter scarves. She found it the next morning while looking for a drop cloth. It was a school exercise book, the cheap kind, and Vera's handwriting filled it from 1978 onward, small and slanted and very neat.

Luce sat on the porch step with it and read until the light went.

Vera had come to the house young, a bride, and had opened that same door three years later, the way her niece just had. The early entries were ordinary. Repairs, weather, a husband named Gerald who died of a heart in 1981 and barely got three lines.

Then, October 1981:

*Opened the back room tonight. I don't know why I thought I could keep it closed forever. The paint is breathing. I know how that sounds. I put my ear to the wall and there is a sound like sleep. I have decided to clean it. God help me, I have decided to restore it, like it was a fresco in a church and not whatever it is.*

There were gaps after that, sometimes months. Luce read them in order, in the cold, and her tea went untouched on the step beside her.

*March 1982. Cleaned the north wall today. The gold at the figure's hand, when I wiped the soot off, the whole room warmed. Like a stove lit somewhere. I sat in there two hours. First time since Gerald that I did not cry. I don't know what to make of that.*

*June 1984. It listens. I know it listens. I talked to it about Mother and it was warmer when I left than when I came in. Nico asked me at the store why I look better lately and I nearly told him everything. Didn't.*

*September 1990. Price note. The warmth costs. After a long night in that room I am gray for a day, sometimes two. Cold hands. It takes something. I have decided it takes what I can spare, and no more, and I have decided to believe that, because the alternative is worse.*

That word, price, stopped her. She read the entry three times. Then she read the last page of the book, which was dated eleven months before Vera's death, and it was one line long:

*It is not a painting of something. It is the something. Do not let it be lonely. I think that is when it takes more.*

Luce closed the journal and sat there while the porch light came on by itself, the way it had for thirty years, and the gravel at the end of the lane stayed empty, and somewhere behind her, through the open window, the house made a sound she decided was the wood cooling down.

She went inside. She did not go upstairs. She slept on the couch with the journal under her pillow the way people sleep with a favorite book, and she was asleep in four minutes, which was more than she could say for any night that summer so far.

In the morning, the coffee she'd left in the pot overnight was still warm.

The next night she meant to stay up. She had the journal open on the coffee table and a pen in her hand, planning to make her own notes, her own price ledger, because she was an archivist and that was how her brain worked. Everything got catalogued. Everything got a condition report.

She fell asleep at eleven with the pen still in her hand.

The dream did not feel like a dream. That was the first thing she noticed, later, when she tried to pick it apart. Dreams have that soft seam in them, the part where the logic gives way and you stop questioning. This one had no seam. She was standing in the back room, except the room was wrong. The walls were gone. The floor was river water, shallow, ankle deep, moving slow, and above her there was no ceiling, just a sky the gray green of deep water with light coming through it the way light does.

"You came," said a voice behind her.

She turned around. The figure from the wall was standing in the shallows, and up close it was not a painting of a person. It was made of the same light as the sky, moonlight and river water, and its face kept sliding the way faces do in dreams, and then it didn't. It settled. It looked at her, and it had Vera's dark hair and no face she could name besides that, and its expression was careful, the way a person is careful with a dog that has been kicked before.

"You're not real," Luce said.

"No," it agreed. "And here you are anyway."

The water moved around its ankles. Luce looked down at her own feet. She was barefoot, in the flannel shirt she'd actually gone to sleep in, and the water was warm. Everything in that room was warm.

"Vera wrote about you," Luce said. "In her journal. She said you take something. A price."

The figure was quiet for a moment. "I take what is given," it said. "There is a difference. Your aunt understood the difference late, and it cost her, and I am sorry for that in whatever way I am able to be sorry."

"That's not an answer."

"No," it said. "It is an apology. Answers come after. If you want them."

Luce stood there in the warm water with her arms crossed, and she realized she was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the dream. She had been cold since the hospital, since the phone call she still could not replay without her hands going numb. Eight years with Gene, and then forty minutes of a doctor explaining outcomes, and then she had packed one car and driven north to a dead woman's house because it was cheap and far away and she did not have to talk to anyone in it.

"I'm not lonely," she said, out loud, and the figure tilted its head, and the light in the room dimmed a shade, like a lamp turned down by someone kind enough not to laugh at her.

"You may not be," it said. "I did not say lonely. I said alone. Those are different doors." It raised one hand, palm out, and there was the worn gold ring around it, the spot Vera had touched for years. "I can leave now. I can stay at the wall and be paint, and you can catalogue me and put me in a box and that will be the end of it. Or you can let me show you what your aunt found. It is your hand on my hand or it is not. Nobody has ever been able to make it be anything else. I would not want them to."

Luce looked at the offered palm for a long time.

"Why do you want me to touch it?"

"Because it is warm," the figure said, "and I have been cold a very long time, and so have you. That is the whole of my honesty tonight."

"You sound like a classified ad."

The figure smiled. It was the first time its face did anything she could have sworn to. "Your aunt said something similar. In 1983, I believe. She called me a lonely hearts column with plaster for a body."

Luce laughed. It came out of her sideways and surprised them both, and the water around her feet rippled with it, literally rippled, and she stopped laughing and stared down at that.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Show me."

She put her hand on the palm. The gold was warm as bathwater and the touch went through her like a stone dropped in a well, down and down, and the figure drew her close, slow, giving her every inch of the distance to pull back from, and she did not pull back.

What happened after did not happen the way bodies happen. There were no bodies, exactly. There was the figure's mouth at her throat, which was made of light and was somehow still a mouth, and there were hands, more than two, she was nearly sure, moving down her back under the flannel, and every place they touched went warm and stayed warm, a map of lit windows across her skin. She heard herself make a sound she had not made in over a year. The figure made one back, low, pleased, patient.

"Tell me if any of it is wrong," it said against her ear. "Any of it. At any point."

"None of it," she managed. "None of it is wrong."

The robe came away like water coming off a stone. She was not sure which of them it came off of. The light from above came down through the water and through both of them and there was nothing in the room that was not warm now, and the figure's hand slid down her stomach, unhurried, and stopped at the top of her thigh.

"May I?"

"Yes," she said. "God, yes!"

The fingers moved down and found her, and she was already wet, embarrassingly, gratefully wet, and the figure made that low sound again and pushed two fingers into her slow, all the way, and curled them, and Luce's knees went. The figure held her up. It held her up the way water holds things, from every side at once, and worked her with a patience that felt older than the house, older than the county, and her hips started moving and she stopped caring about anything she had ever cared about, the ledger, the price, the boxes in the garage with GENE'S WINTER written on them in her own handwriting.

"Again," she heard herself say. "There. Again."

It gave her there, again, and again, and when she came it went through her whole body like the stone hitting the bottom of the well, and the water around their ankles glowed for a second, actual light, and she grabbed the figure's shoulders and shook and shook and the figure held her through all of it and did not rush a single second of it.

She woke up on the couch at a quarter past six with the pen still in her hand and the journal open to the price page.

* * *

She knew right away that something was wrong with her body, and it took her a full minute of lying there to work out what. It wasn't just the arousal, which was still fading out of her in slow waves, deep and specific, the kind she had not felt since before the diagnosis, before the hospital chairs, before all of it. It was her hands.